Writing The Vampire’s Skull – Part 1
Usually when I write a novel, I’ve been kicking the idea around for months, sometimes years. This means that when I sit down to think about the plot, I have something to use as a starting point – a character, a situation, some bits of dialogue, something. Typically there are at least a dozen pages of notes in my notebook and a folder full of scraps of paper. And maybe a folder full of images on my computer to serve as inspiration. This time I had nothing. I’m not quite sure how that happened.
In part, the problem was that I was coming to a new genre, urban fantasy. I’d dabbled with a few ideas in the past, but nothing that was intended for publication. I was starting with a blank sheet. I wrote ‘Urban Fantasy #1’ on the top of the paper. The ‘#1’ was an indication that I should be thinking in terms of a series and not a one-off novel. To be honest, I think anyone writing any form of genre fiction should be thinking about a series – whether they’re looking to self-publish or submit to a traditional publisher. But that’s a topic for another time.
Urban Fantasy #1 was also intended to be a proof of concept. A way of testing out all the research I’d done for my book Urban Fantasy: How to Write Paranormal and Supernatural Thrillers. I’d been reading and writing about urban fantasy for a year at that point, so I knew what I was doing. Probably.
A key component of that how-to book was creating a female hero, so I knew that I needed to create a female protagonist. That’s always a bit more of a challenge for me because I’m… er… male. But I’d been writing romance novels for the past couple of years, so I didn’t feel as intimidated as I had prior to that.
I also knew that I was going to write this article, either as the final chapter for my book on writing urban fantasy or as a piece for my website. I kept all of my handwritten notes so I’d be able to document my process after the novel was written. Going back through that stack of papers is a bit of an archaeological dig.
To give this article some semblance of structure, I’ll use headings that more or less correspond to chapters in the how-to book, which I’ll refer to as ‘Urban Fantasy (2023)’ from now on. And because this is a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness piece of writing, I’m going to split it into two parts. The first part will deal with inspiration and finding the characters. The second will be a breakdown of the plot, showing what decisions I made and why I made them.
I’m going to try and present things in the order in which I came up with them. I began with the central character. Or rather, the fact that I didn’t yet have a central character.
The Female Hero
Sometimes I have an idea for a plot and need to find a character to fit it. Sometimes I have a character and want to find a plot that is suitable for them. This time I had neither.
When it comes to creating a female hero for an urban fantasy, I think you have basically two options:
(i) A professional hero
(ii) An amateur hero
Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter is a professional hero. When Guilty Pleasures (1993) opens, Anita has years of experience dealing with vampires and other supernatural creatures. She knows her stuff. She can handle weapons and fight hand-to-hand when she needs to. Someone like Sookie Stackhouse is not a professional hero, she has to muddle along and make things up as she goes along.
My first instinct was to create a professional female hero. A ‘kick-ass’ female hero. I’ve always enjoyed the Modesty Blaise novels and comic strips, and thought I’d create someone like that. And I did create such a character and I gave her a job that would get her involved with supernatural creatures including vampires, and she had the potential to be a series hero.
I then began brainstorming ideas for a plot and things quickly ground to a halt. As a writer, you have to trust your gut feelings. And my gut was telling me something was wrong. This wasn’t the right sort of protagonist for me. Why? Two reasons, I think. Firstly, guns and combat are not really my thing. I enjoy watching John Wick, but it’s not the sort of thing I write. My stuff is more like The A-Team – lots of bullets are fired but no one is ever killed. And secondly, I’m much more comfortable writing an underdog character than a skilled and charismatic one. I know what that says about me, I don’t need you to psychoanalyse me, thank you very much.
I’m not going to give details of my first attempt at a protagonist. I may decide that I’m ready to write about her at some future point. It’s never a good idea to talk about something you haven’t written yet, so I’ll say nothing about her.
In Urban Fantasy (2023) I talk about female characters in male-dominated occupations, giving G.I. Jane (Demi Moore) and Private Benjamin (Goldie Hawn) as examples of women in the military. I felt more comfortable creating something closer to the Goldie Hawn character. My protagonist wouldn’t be quite so kooky and giggly, but she would have a sense of humour.
With the idea of a female mercenary thrown out, I decided I’d write about a private detective. I was familiar with the detective genre, I’d written a couple of detective thrillers, and thought I could have fun with a down-at-heel female private eye. Francesca ‘Frankie’ Rowan popped into my head fully formed at that point. Looking at my notes, it took me a couple of attempts to come up with a name for her, but everything else came as a package. I wanted her to have a name that could be shortened to something masculine or gender-neutral because she’s a bit of a tomboy.
Notes I made for myself at this early stage included, ‘Introduce heroine – not too kick-ass, but a little bit.’ Frankie wasn’t a professional fighter, but she was an underdog who could look out for herself. When she finds herself cornered by an escaped prisoner at the beginning of the story, we soon see how she handles herself. She improvises.
Writing the opening of the novel in the first-person helped me find Frankie’s voice and character pretty quickly. And – this is important – I liked her immediately. My romance novel Treasured stalled for a couple of weeks because I didn’t like my protagonist. I had to go back and rewrite the opening to turn her into someone I could more readily identify with. If I don’t care about a character, how man I expect my readers to like her?
The character of Frankie was somewhere between a first-person private eye I’d written about before and the main character of my first romance novel, Fandango which was written in third-person (and published under the name Lina Plumpston). I felt confident that I could stay in Frankie’s head and have fun writing her story. The trickiest part was remembering that she’s almost thirty years younger than me. Luckily, a lot of the movies I enjoyed in the 1980s are still popular as modern ‘classics.’
While I made Frankie Rowan a somewhat experienced private eye, I kept her knowledge of the supernatural world relatively limited. She’s not an expert, she’s more like Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. Readers can learn about my version of magic and the supernatural as Frankie does.
I was also in two minds about whether Frankie would have any supernatural abilities of her own. In the end, I went with something fairly low-key. She has a special ‘knack’ for finding things – missing people and lost objects. I thought this was something I could develop over several stories, but having planted the idea in my own head, I ended up making use of it almost immediately.
I think hidden or unsuspected superpowers or psychic abilities tap into childhood fantasies. I certainly remember enjoying the original version of the television series The Tomorrow People, and there was a wish fulfilment element there.
Naming Characters
A note here on naming characters. I have several books of surnames and first names on the shelf above my computer. I probably spend longer than I should coming up with character names. When I have a character’s full name, I always google it to make sure it hasn’t already been used for a major character in a novel, movie or tv series – and to make sure it isn’t the name of a celebrity of any kind. For some reason, I had issues with almost every name in this story. And the hardest thing of all was coming up with a single, short name for a vampire. Every name I came up with – I tried twenty or thirty – had already been used. There are a lot of fictional vampires out there. Almost none of my characters ended up keeping the name they had in my first draft. Having said that, it’s not uncommon for me to rename characters after I’ve written the first draft when I know their personalities better. I know authors who use XXXX and YYYY for character names and then search and replace at the end, but I have to give my story people at least placeholder names.
Setting
In choosing an ‘urban’ setting for my urban fantasy, I had a few options. I could invent a city. I did that for my 1930s murder mystery series. I could even have used a modern-day version of that same city. I could have picked London, which everyone knows. As a student, I’d lived in Manchester, so that was a possibility. As were Liverpool and York, both of which I’d visited a few times. Or I could use Nottingham, which I’ve known my whole life.
When choosing a location for your story, bear two things in mind. How well do you know the location? And, how well is it known to non-residents? In choosing a UK city, I will usually ask myself if American readers will have heard of it. If I was choosing an American city, I’d ask myself whether readers in Europe would know where it was. Most readers in Europe don’t know where many American states are.
Having decided that my story was going to be somewhat humorous, I knew I could have some fun with my setting. One of my sticky-notes says, ‘Add a sort of Steed and Mrs. Peel surreality.’ I’ve always been a fan of the British tv show The Avengers, so capturing that sort of feel seemed like a good idea. Another notes says, ‘A warped version of Nottingham – modern city, but some history. Victorian areas, caves, etc.’ Nottingham and the county of Nottinghamshire contain enough history and areas of interest that I felt I could make them work as the setting for a series. Picking a place I knew well also meant I wouldn’t have to do masses of research or spend ages on Google Street View.
I put Frankie’s office and apartment above a shop in an unspecified area of the city. I invented a pub called the Green Man and put it in a specific area of the city but didn’t reveal exactly where. I also made up a coffee shop. All the other locations are real.
I needed an abandoned village for the climax of my story. I don’t know of any such place locally, so I created one based on a couple of places near where I live. The idea of an abandoned village came from a series of videos I’d seen on YouTube exploring abandoned places in the UK. Having made up a village, I decided to give Newstead Abbey a fake name. When you use a real place, you have to be careful what you do with it in a story. You don’t want to upset the owners or local people. I was planning to put a bunch of occultists in a cellar under the abbey, so renaming it seemed a good idea. I was also giving Lord Byron another name, so it it made sense to rename his former home.
Although urban fantasy stories are (usually) set in our modern day world, we have the advantage of it being an ‘alternative’ or ‘parallel’ world – one where supernatural beings and magic exist. This also gives us the freedom to make a few other changes to the setting.
Beyond these few minor changes, I wasn’t planning to do much worldbuilding. I was just going to make it up as I went along. I dropped in a few ideas as I went along – such as the fact that vampires have their own prison on a remote Scottish island – thinking I might use these things in future stories. It made sense to me that vampires couldn’t be kept in ordinary prisons with human inmates or human guards. And that also meant my character Theo didn’t have to worry about encountering vampires when he was behind bars.
As I brainstormed the opening of the novel, one issue I had was establishing that the setting included magic and supernatural beings. The way I originally planned it, the first chapter read like a straightforward crime thriller. I had the urban but no fantasy. I did think about adding a prologue where Frankie or someone else had an encounter with vampires or some other creatures, but in the end I introduced the barman Fitz in the pub Frankie visits. He establishes that non-humans exist in my story world. And he’s a background character who could have a major role in a future novel. In my head, he’s straight out of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
For the Green Man, I deliberately tried to capture the feeling of a traditional British pub, but at the same time I was thinking of it being like the bar in Cheers – but with vampires and other creatures sitting around drinking beer, like the cantina in the first Star Wars film.
When I write about a place like the Green Man, I usually only have a fuzzy image in my head. I usually concentrate on getting the dialogue and action down on paper first, and then I go back to write the description and insert it.
In writing description – of people or places – I tend to use a brainstorming technique that I read about in an essay by Ray Bradbury. It’s called ‘Run Fast, Stand Still, or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs,’ and it is included in his essay collection Zen and the Art of Writing. He talks about how he evokes places and the feelings he had for them by putting down words that evoke memories and provide a sense of place. Since Bradbury is an expert in the use of language, and sometimes referred to as the poet of science fiction, he’s a good person to learn from. Using this kind of technique seems to require a different part of my brain to writing than coming up with dialogue and action, so I treat it as a separate exercise and then stitch the descriptive passages into the patchwork of my story. In order not to slow down the writing of my first draft of a chapter, I will often insert square brackets with notes like [Insert description of car here].
After the pub, I introduce Frankie’s office and her apartment. Technically we’d call it a ‘flat’ in the UK, but I used ‘apartment’ for my US readers. Frankie’s is based on a flat I lived in (briefly) as a student and on Stephanie Plum’s place in Janet Evanovich’s novels. I hadn’t realised that until I just wrote it. After 30 novels in the series, Stephanie’s apartment seems very familiar to me.
Dramatis Personae
The cast of named characters in The Vampire’s Skull is relatively small. They consist of Frankie’s equivalent of a ‘Scooby Gang,’ plus vampires and a human villain.
The Scooby Gang
Given that relationships can be a significant element in an urban fantasy, I made Frankie Rowan single. Taking a common romance genre path, I said she had been in an unsuccessful relationship and that she isn’t sure that she is ready to date again. This explains why a likeable character is currently unattached. And suggests she’s available for a romantic relationship, even if she isn’t actively looking for one. Making her seem a little bit lonely and dissatisfied with her current situation adds to her underdog status and, hopefully, helps readers identify with her.
I make reference to Frankie’s ex having moved to Manchester with no intention of coming back. I gave him a name, but I have no idea who he is or why he and Frankie split up. Frankie hints that he’s a ‘bad boy,’ so that’s something I could pick up in a future story.
Initially, I planned for Theo the thief to be older and more physically imposing. But then I thought it would make more sense if he was younger and more vulnerable, so that Frankie would feel a need to help him and protect him.
I made Theo bisexual because it allowed for him to have a relationship with his prison cellmate. And because it opens up opportunities for relationships with other male and female characters. It makes the dynamic between him and Frankie and him and Roca fun, because he flirts with both of them. And the fact that he seems to have gone away with one of the other characters at the end of the novel creates a situation I could develop in a future story.
The thing about Theo, his cellmate and toes I stole from the outtakes or gag reel on the Starsky and Hutch (2004) DVD, I think. That also makes Owen Wilson one of the inspirations for Theo, though that wasn’t a conscious decision.
The vampire, Roca, was always going to be the mysterious bad boy who got Frankie’s attention. I brought him onstage as a chauffeur/bodyguard who is nice to look at but doesn’t say very much. But things get interesting when Roca and Frankie’s fingers accidentally touch and they both feel a shock of magical energy. What does it mean? When I first wrote about it, I had no idea. But it did lead me to think about the kind of ‘magic’ that creates and sustains vampires and the magic that gives Frankie her knack for finding things.
Originally, I thought Frankie, the thief Theo, and the vampire Roca might be a love triangle. But as I wrote those early scenes about him, Theo seemed about ten years younger than Frankie. I thought it would be fun if he became a sort of Robin-like sidekick to Roca’s taciturn Batman (pun intended).
Frankie needed a mentor and information source, so I created Lily Lomax. She’s the equivalent of Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was inspired by the Beryl Reid character in the BBC version of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.
With Theo originally intended to be an older character, his mother was supposed to be an older woman who was kidnapped and threatened by the bad guys to make Theo hand over the stolen skull. When I got to that point in the story, I decided his mum needed to be younger. And having her kidnapped and threatened was too much of a cliché. I’d already hinted that she was possibly a thief too, so I made her a slightly older version of Modesty Blaise – and well able to take care of herself. It might have been fun to have her be part of the final battle in the story, but I didn’t really have a role for her. Theo’s mum and his nan ended up being sidelined. But they’re two characters I can bring back in future stories.
The detective Matt Holden also ended up being sidelined. I’d intended that he have a more prominent role in the story, but I didn’t find much for him to do. It’s common for the female hero of an urban fantasy to have to choose between a couple of guys, setting up a sort of love triangle, so that’s why Matt Holden is there. And a private eye always has an inside source in the police department. Matt has an interest in Frankie. She likes him but doesn’t know if she wants to date him. I leave this unresolved in the current story, though it’s clear there is some rivalry between Matt and Roca. To be honest, Matt is a cliché and if I bring him back in a future story, I need to find a way to put a spin on his character so he’s not just another clichéd tv cop.
The Vampire Circus
Emil Pendaran, the leader of the second vampire clan, is also a bit of a cliché. He was a relatively late addition to the cast. On the TV Tropes website he’s the kind of character labelled a ‘flaming demon,’ a bad guy who looks and acts like a camp gay man. Pendaran was inspired by the character of Lorne (Andy Hallett) in Angel and Mason Alexander Park’s portrayal of Desire in The Sandman tv series. I chose this sort of character because I needed someone to contrast strongly with Strabö, the other vampire clan leader. He was also fun to write.
Vadim Fredek is the equivalent of a James Bond henchman. I needed him to be a nasty vampire, so I took the easy way out and made him both crazy and physically repulsive. His injuries made me think of him as being like the Phantom of the Opera and there’s a bit of the Frankenstein monster in there too.
Beauty and the Beast
Maxim Jarrett, the high priest of the occult brotherhood, is the main villain. To some extent he was inspired by Aleister Crowley. In terms of appearance, he’s one of those middle-aged men you see who dye their hair and beard jet black and suck in their gut and pretend they’re muscular. I just wanted him to be someone the reader wouldn’t like.
Madam Echidna the… er… madam is a sexy snake woman. She doesn’t get much screen time. I’d say she was a walk-on part, but she doesn’t have any legs. I included her as a reminder to the reader that there’s more than just vampires in my urban fantasy world. Having included her, I came up with an idea that could work as the second novel in the series. We shall see.
Relationships
Given that relationships can be an important element in urban fantasy, I wanted to create characters who had the potential to be in relationships. Having spent a couple of years reading and writing about the romance genre – and having written a handful of romance novels – I felt ready to tackle relationships in urban fantasy. I also wanted to have at least one relationship subplot that ran across several novels.
I committed quite a lot of words in the first quarter of the novel to establishing a relationship between Frankie and Theo. I deliberately set it up as if it was the beginning of a romance plot. I needed Frankie – and the reader – to care about Theo to add to the impact of events later in the story when Theo is missing and assumed to be at the mercy of the bad guys. Very early on, I thought that at some point Theo was going to be captured by the bad guys. I actually wrote towards that, setting up Theo’s kidnap. But then I decided that him being bundled into a van with a bag over his head was too much of a cliché, so I flipped things around. You don’t want readers to guess exactly what’s coming next, so a bit of misdirection is always useful.
The Original Plot Idea
My first idea, as I mentioned in part one, was to create a kick-ass Modesty Blaise-type character. And my first plot idea was for that character. Here’s a slightly shortened version of what I wrote.
Protagonist is investigating the death of an old friend – an art thief. Police believe his death was an accident – he fell off a building during a theft. Protagonist believes he was murdered.
She learns that the thief’s last job was to steal something for the local Mr. Big. She wants to talk to this crime boss, but she can’t get close to him. She gets his attention when she beats up a group of thugs sent to ‘discourage’ her interest in their boss. He agrees to meet her.
[If I’d gone ahead and written this, I would have opened with the protagonist fighting Mr. Big’s vampire henchmen, leaving the explanation of why the fight occurs until afterwards. This would have established my hero and the supernatural beings of the world she lives in.]
Mr. Big tries to fob her off, but she won’t accept her fake story. Eventually, he tells her the truth. Some of it. He asked the thief to steal something for him. An ancient artefact. An occult object said to have magical powers. He tells her of the curse attached to the object. Perhaps it was the curse that killed the thief? She thinks it’s more likely to be the person he stole the object from who killed him. She guesses it was stolen from Mr. Big’s criminal rival. He doesn’t deny it.
Mr. Big wants to know who killed the thief. He’ll pay the protagonist’s usual fee if she investigates. And he’ll give her whatever help he can. She is suspicious but accepts. On one condition: If she finds out Mr. Big was responsible for the thief’s death, she will expose his guilt.
Mr. Big then sends one of his men, a vampire, to keep an eye on the protagonist. She spots him following her.
The protagonist visits Mr. Big’s rival, Mr. Big 2 in my notes. He says he didn’t kill the thief. He thinks Mr. Big got the thief to steal the cursed object, then killed him. He also says he wants his object back and is prepared to pay a reward for its return.
The protagonist gradually learns the value and power of the stolen object. In my first notes, I had no idea what the nature of that power was. I did think it might contain the ashes of a powerful magician and could be something similar to a genie in a bottle. I started referring to the object as ‘the Vessel.’
I also wrote that there could be a third party trying to get their hands on the Vessel. Possibly a human criminal or occultist. He might also be trying to start a war between the two rival vampire gangs, hoping they will wipe each other out.
That was the sum total of my original idea for the plot of the novel.
After I decided that I wanted my protagonist to be less Lara Croft/Anita Blake and more Philip Marlowe, I had to approach the idea from a slightly different angle. My down-at-heel private detective couldn’t go beating up Mr. Big’s henchmen.
If you’ve read The Vampire’s Skull, you can see how this original idea morphed into something similar but different. More on this below.
Plotting
I decided to keep the thief alive, creating the character of Theo Pherson. The opening scenes where Theo is looking for Frankie and she thinks he intends to attack her are based on something I wrote many years ago. They’re from the first screenplay I ever wrote when I was learning screenplay writing. Most of that script was terrible and I never showed it to anyone, but I always liked that opening scene leading up to the restroom fight. Reusing this got my story moving pretty quickly and introduced two of my major characters. And in this story, the scene almost works as a ‘cute meet’ for Theo and Frankie, after the initial misunderstanding is out of the way. This turned Theo into someone who had been convicted of the murder of a vampire and who escaped from prison to prove his innocence.
In a plot-driven story like an urban fantasy, I think it’s a good idea to draw the reader into a story with a first chapter that has some interesting action going on. I do include a bit of Frankie’s backstory, but only enough so that the reader knows who she is and why she’s there. Showing her in action gets the reader onside with her and I can spend more time exploring her character later.
Having come up with a female hero, a setting, and taken an opening scene from my old spec screenplay, I now had to give some serious thought to the plot of the novel. I’d already decided that I was using a variation of the private eye story plot, so that basic structure gave me some clues about the kind of elements I needed to come up with. In Urban Fantasy (2023) I call this plot variation a monster-of-the-week plot. It’s somewhere between a straight detective thriller, a traditional James Bond movie plot, and a horror movie.
A feature of many private detective novels (and movies) is that the hero investigates two separate cases. These later turn out to be related, with both being part of a larger criminal conspiracy.
From my old screenplay, I had the idea that Theo had broken out of prison and wanted Frankie to prove he wasn’t guilty of the murder he’d been convicted of. This was the first case. In the screenplay, it was an ordinary human-on-human murder, in the new novel Theo had been found guilty of illegally killing a vampire, Vadim Fredek. Theo said he could prove he was innocent because the vampire had got up and walked out of the morgue.
For the second case, I had private eye Frankie Rowan go to meet a powerful businessman. Oskar Strabö owns the Green Man, Frankie’s favourite pub, and he’s also a vampire. I introduce him like the Marlon Brando character in The Godfather or like Louis Cypher (Robert DeNiro) in Angel Heart. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? I let the reader wonder about this.
My first thought was that Strabö would be a ‘kingpin’ – the head of a criminal gang like in a gangster movie. But he ended up being the leader of one of the most powerful vampire gangs in England. I said that there were two main clans, one that controlled the south of England and one that controlled the north. Strabö hires Frankie to recover a stolen object – an ancient vampire skull that is said to have belonged to a powerful vampire sorcerer thousands of years ago.
In the beginning, I wrote a couple of notes to myself about plot. Both were about plots I should avoid. Firstly, avoid plots about the raising of a big bad demon whose plan is to destroy the world. The problem with destroy-the-world plots is that it is very difficult to come up with something of similar scale for a second or third novel in a series. If you start too big, you’ve got nothing to build up to in later stories. You can see this in a series like Supernatural. Each season they had to try and come up with something to equal or top last season’s climax. My advice to myself was, ‘Keep things smaller scale – more akin to film noir detective plots.’
The other kind of plot I told myself to avoid was a quest to obtain a magical weapon or amulet. I thought these were too clichéd.
So, yeah, I pretty much failed on both counts here. The skull in my story is regarded as something like a weapon of mass destruction and it can be used to resurrect a powerful vampire sorcerer who could destroy the world. But I did manage to keep things at a reasonable scale, I didn’t over-emphasise the end-of-the-world bit, trying to keep the stakes at a level where it was individual characters who were in danger, not the whole of humankind.
My initial idea was that Frankie would have to locate some kind of vessel containing the sorcerer’s spirit – like a genie in a bottle. Then I decided I wanted to call my book The Vampire’s Skull, so she had to find a missing skull that contained his spirit. I just found a sticky-note with another title suggestion: Dead Vampires Tell No Tales. I don’t even remember coming up with that.
A plot question I asked myself early on was, ‘Why does the vampire godfather hire Frankie to find the skull?’ One of the reasons that Frankie has an almost psychic ability for locating things is to answer that question. I added a couple more reasons later.
The find-the-skull plot is basically a variation on The Maltese Falcon, one of the original and best private eye novels. Strabö, the vampire kingpin who hires Frankie, is my version of Casper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet). In my head, the character is played by Orson Welles. It was a bit of a cliché to give him an Eastern European name, but vampire folklore originated there and sometimes you just have to go with the obvious.
Having come up with all of my main characters – well, most of them – and my two investigations, it was time for me to use the eight-sequence model and come up with the rest of the plot framework. As soon as possible, I like to know that I have enough potential material for a novel – especially when I’m looking to write something close to 90,000 words. Having used the eight-sequence plot framework for a few years now, I have a much better idea of when I have enough plot for a full-length novel.
Back in the days when I was a ‘pantser’ (I hate that word), I used to struggle with plotting. I had no idea how to structure things, so I’d jam loads of material into the beginning of a story. And then when I got to 20,000 words or so, I’d run out of stuff. When I did finally complete a novel-length manuscript, I did it by creating more and more stuff. Even though I later used the eight-sequence model to ‘fix’ some of those early novels, you can still see evidence of the problem.
The first time I consciously used the eight-sequence model from the beginning of a novel was for The Sword in the Stone-Dead, and it was something like an epiphany for me as a writer. I discovered that I didn’t need more material, I just had to learn to pace my story events properly. I haven’t had a problem meeting my target word count for a novel since then.
In my plot brainstorming session, I came up with three main set-piece or ‘tentpole’ scenes (not to be confused with a ‘tentpole movie’): (i) Frankie faces the monster vampire, Fredek; (ii) a journey through underground, booby-trapped catacombs, and (iii) a shootout between the two rival clans of vampires in a deserted village. My notes refer to these as a Phantom of the Opera scene, an Indiana Jones scene, and a Western gunfight scene.
Why these scenes in particular? I’m not sure. They’re all familiar scenes from genre movies. Remember always that genre readers are looking for something the same only different. That’s why they keep coming back to their favourite genre. And in urban fantasy we get to borrow things from different genres. These three scenes were from movies that I enjoy and so they’re the kind of scene I like writing. The idea of having a Western-style shootout in a small English village (the same only different) amused me. And I could see the scene in my head as soon as I thought of it. That’s usually a good sign.
The shootout wouldn’t be the climax of the story, I had a fourth scene for that, with an occult brotherhood performing a ritual to resurrect the vampire sorcerer. Having established that his resurrection is a possibility, the ritual becomes almost an ‘obligatory scene.’
These four scenes added a bit of action-adventure to my private eye story, giving it the sort of pulp fiction vibe I was aiming for. When I came to write these scenes, I’d take a kind of post-modern approach, with Frankie and the other characters being aware that they’re engaged in genre story clichés, and I even reference some movie titles. Though in the catacombs sequence, I never actually say where the phrase ‘booty traps’ comes from – that’s a kind of in-joke for readers in the know and it mirrors the fact that Roca is confused by Frankie’s movie references.
Rising Action & The Climax
A slightly tricky element in this plot, which I also faced in my recent science fiction novel Wicked Racers, was having an action scene at about the three-quarters point and then needing to come up with an even more dramatic scene for the climax of the story. In both cases, I tackled this by having the earlier scene rely almost completely on physical danger and then the climax be much more character-based, with emotional danger as well as physical risk.
Another note on a similar subject: you need to make sure your climax lives up to the build-up to it. I’ve read a lot of novels, some by big-name authors, where the climactic scene zips past so quickly that it feels like an anticlimax. There’s a danger when you’re writing that it is such a relief to finally get to the climax, that you don’t give it the attention it needs. As a rough rule of thumb, I’d say that the climactic action of your story should take up around 10% of the total word count or page count of your story. And that excludes any resolution stuff – what Mark Twain referred to as marryin’ and buryin’ – that comes after the action. This climax typically begins towards the end of Sequence 7 and runs into Sequence 8.
In Part 2 of this article, I’ll share my outline for the novel and show you how I used the eight sequence model for the monster-of-the-week plot from Urban Fantasy (2023)
PAUL TOMLINSON 